On Flying Saucer, Mid-Market and unproven restaurant neighborhoods

In writing my Sunday piece on the risks and potential rewards facing many potential restaurants headed to (or flirting with) SoMa, particularly in Mid-Market, one theme that kept popping up with most of the chefs and restaurateurs was patience. Some neighborhoods come around — look at Hayes Valley, the Valencia corridor, and Oakland’s Uptown. Others, like Jack London Square, might take longer; Gordon Drysdale waited a decade for Verbena’s Oakland surroundings to come around before deciding to pull the plug.

In San Francisco, you can point to places like Nopa, Foreign Cinema, Delfina and Hayes Street Grill as neighborhood pioneers, but Absinthe’s Bill Russell-Shapiro pointed to another, more-forgotten restaurant that was ahead of its time when came to betting on an unproven neighborhood: The Flying Saucer.

“The pioneer of that kind of movement was the Flying Saucer. It’s all set to that,” says Russell-Shapiro.

Albert Tordjman opened the Flying Saucer in 1990 on the Mission District corner of Guerrero and 22nd (the space is now Company). He came to the city from Napa’s ritzy fine dining destination, Auberge du Soleil, which back in those pre-Keller days, was the upscale place in Wine Country. At the Flying Saucer, he cooked with an open pantry, incorporating global flavors like Moroccan, Japanese and French. He was a fine dining chef going more casual in an unproven dining neighborhood. And he helped herald a new era of the Mission.

After opening, accolades quickly followed for the eight-table, cash-only Bohemian restaurant. From the Chronicle Archives alone: “an eccentric, extremely personal, culinary and cultural statement“; “the best tiny restaurant in San Francisco”; “delicious food at reasonable prices”; and “ whimsical food and flamboyant style.” They fielded 100+ calls a day, and were known to turn away the mayor because there were no availabilities.

The restaurant also garnered fame because of Tordjman himself. Then-Chronicle writer Tom Sietsema wrote in 1994 that “only Tonya Harding could pose more of public relations dilemma.” In her early 90s review, critic Patricia Unterman shared this encounter:

During my second visit, Tordjman came to our table and said that, if I was the critic Patricia Unterman, he would throw me out. The chef then launched into a passionate speech about the undue power of critics, asserting that he didn’t want any in his restaurant because food writers knew nothing about food. He said, movingly, that he had spent 25 years “in the fire” and that all it took was a few negative comments from ignorant, untrained critics to discredit a lifetime of work.

Tordjman bet on the still-developing neighborhood, too. He opened a tapas place next door a few years later. But that area was rougher back then — after one review that noted its cash-only policy, it was held up by robbers. He sold it in 1999 and it closed in 2001 during the dot-com meltdown. But the makings of the new Mission were set, with places like Delfina, Tartine, and Foreign Cinema opening in the late 90s.